rushing to the surface. The new doctors
tended to be older than their earlier
counterparts, more invested in their
nonmilitary work, more politically cir-
cumspect. They sought to slow down
the research, and began to question
Ketchum s methodology.
A physician named Mark Needle
told me that he thought Ketchum s
human experiments were run like the
Keystone Kops. "There was nobody
qualified," he said. "And the fact that
they were allowed to do it without peo-
ple who knew what they were doing was
very, very scary. There was no human-
ity in it. There was no morality in it. If
anything happened to the volunteers,
we could say, You were offered an out,
but then we were also telling them, Lis-
ten, this is the Army, and we are at war.
Our view was that this was a terrible
thing to do to these kids, because who
the hell knew what could happen?"
When Ketchum sought to orches-
trate a field test with a new version of
BZ, four doctors wrote in dissent. He
overruled them. Another version, called
EA 3834, appeared to cause micro-
scopic hematuria---tiny amounts of
blood in urine---and other renal prob-
lems. One soldier was sent to Walter
Reed. "This is a dangerous drug," a psy-
chiatrist named George Leib insisted.
Leib, who worked on the arsenal s an-
nual budget, had come to think that
tests of a baroque nature and question-
able design were being funded merely to
sustain the program. His office was
across from the toxic-aid station, and he
was sure that records were being manip-
ulated to disguise problem cases. "Ev-
eryone I spoke to had misgivings," he
told me. "I had a volunteer who just
sailed through a forty-eight-hour test
without problems, and then soon after-
ward, while on leave, he was driving and
crashed into the back of a truck and
killed himself. I felt responsible. I felt
like I had not done everything I could.
But I certainly had done everything that
I was allowed to do."
The testing of EA 3834 was sus-
pended. There were more studies, more
discussions; nothing could be conclu-
sively determined. The arguing under-
scored the medical scrutiny given to the
volunteers, but also illustrated impor-
tant differences: physicians who saw no
benefit to the experiments did not want
to tolerate even minor risks. "Ketchum
said it would be O.K. to continue," Leib
told me. "To me, it made no sense." As
the two men argued, Ketchum accused
Leib---who occasionally consulted with
the C.I.A. on chemical work---of being
a spy, and blamed him for taking a se-
cret codebook from a safe in his office.
(Ketchum doesn t remember the dis-
pute.) "My house and car were ran-
sacked, seats were taken apart," Leib
told me. "In the end, the book was in
Ketchum s closet."
In early 1969, Ketchum told a superior
that he thought the program was not
"facing a very rosy future." As antiwar
protesters gathered outside the arsenal s
gates, the insubordination was giving
way to overt acts of rebellion. Doctors
leaked details about the research to the
press; some even criticized the work
publicly. One physician told me that he
had come to believe that in many cases
the arsenal had not done sufficient ani-
mal tests, and, fearing that he would
have to violate the Hippocratic oath, he
told Ketchum that he wanted a transfer,
even if it meant being sent to Vietnam.
Edgewood was not all that had
changed. "I was smoking dope and hav-
ing sex every night," Ketchum told me.
"After a while, it became obvious that I
wasn t the same guy I was in 1966." He
suggested that follow-up studies be con-
ducted, he told me, but "nothing came
back on that." He even sought to expand
the arsenal s focus beyond weaponry,
telling the technical director that the
clinical research could be more than "a
medical cog in the war machine. " He
hoped, for instance, that the Army could
study marijuana for its possible thera-
peutic value. "For any medical laboratory
to limit itself to weapons-oriented work
would be most unacceptable to the great
majority of physicians," he added.
Instead of reprimanding the recalci-
trant doctors, Ketchum debated them.
He frequently argued with Al Daniels, a
newly drafted physician, who told me, "I
said, I m not going to do that kind of re-
search. I was, like, Fuck you, throw me
in jail. " Ketchum told Daniels that irre-
sponsible science could happen in any
context, and added, "I do not think it is
fair or accurate to assume that this goes
on in chemical and biological weapons
research any more than it does, let s say,
in cancer research." Daniels was far from
convinced. Ketchum recalled, "He
would say, Go to hell, and I would say,
No, let s talk about this. "
Ketchum is a natural and genial de-
"We re spending Christmas with our grandparents
in the Land of Forced Smiles."